CocoEva Soleil LuzGuerrero Alcazar is an interdisciplinary artist (writer, musician, spoken word artist, dancer, and painter), activist, anti-human trafficking and equity advocate research-consultant and educator. She is originally from La Paz, Bolivia. Her life commitment is focused on prevention and intervention of human trafficking as well as securing access to services for victims and survivors, centering their expertise and experience through participatory and actively anti-oppressive processes and research, by diligently applying and implementing an equity lens and practice. She studied Political Science with a background in Community Advocacy and Social Policy and is pursuing a Master of Arts in Social Justice and Human Rights. She has a 10-year history of creating systemic, institutional, and interpersonal transformation to increase fairness and safety for communities through organizing, advocating policy change, and teamwork with various governmental and community stakeholders. She is currently a Research Fellow at Anti-Trafficking International, works with Polaris as a research consultant for the National Survivor Study and serves as an Appointee in the Department of Justice North Carolina Task Force on Racial Equity and Criminal Justice Victim Advisory Group and offers consulting on issues of equity, research, and survivor leadership to various agencies.
Simultaneously, she is pursuing her project I am AveMagnolia (www.avemagnolia.com), a mix of her artistic work as well as an analytical framework examination of the impacts of trauma on our personal and collective lives, and its inherent relationship with systems of oppression and pathways of liberation. Her work engaging the community as an educator, advocate, and artist, as well as in her one-on-one work with individuals is strongly based in the pedagogy of Paulo Freire’s Popular Education. The approach she brings is a merging of Popular Education, creative expression in all forms, advocacy for intersectionality (Crenshaw) in social justice, and somatic awareness –as tools for self-actualization and transformation, both on a collective as well as individual level. She has worked with targeted communities of all ages in Latin America and the United States, both through institutions and nonprofits, as well as through organizing and community work. Her art, music and writing have been exhibited and publicized in galleries in the United States and South America. Her passion for social justice comes from understanding that experiences that shape our humanity as well as our disconnection from it, result from the macrocosms of systemic oppression (collective trauma) translated into the microcosmos of interpersonal/personal oppression (personal and interpersonal trauma).